squeakland Blog from November, 2009

participants

We used etherpad this time, and started playing with it a little at the beginning.

http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/jNqzRz9GwV/rev.1058

hello all from Randy
Hello this is Cherry and I'm in.
This is Avigail's color
cathie

book sprint December 7 until 12

http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Book+Sprint

http://en.flossmanuals.net/booksprints

for a face-to-face book sprint 2010

when would you have time?

maybe around Squeakfest?

Randy about Virginia:

CK-12 flexbooks will host a chapter on the Launch Abort System (LAS) in the Virginia Physics Flexbook. The simulations of the LAS will be done using etoys. I will make a self-contained version all in etoys that can be used from etoys-to-go. NSF will do a review of the current chapter on modeling and simulation - half of which is etoys. The Obama administration education group is having NSF do the review because they are interested in the approach as a model for education.

CK-12 wants me to put the chapter content in the Creative Commons. Does anyone have guidance for the best choice?
Best choice for..? They should automatically license you under CC.
Etoys is MIT licensed, I'm not sure how the relation is between MIT and CC.
CC: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
GPL is a problem with Etoys because..

courseware blurbs
Tim will email a sample pbskids.org blurb for guidance on the type of language to use.
why Etoys?

next Etoys release in June 2010: Etoys 5

• user interface improvements
• interconnection (screen sharing, object sharing) Will you start from Nebraska?
• layering complexity

• unit tests
• back to Squeak

http://wiki.squeakland.org/download/attachments/16766/newNapkin.png?version=1

http://tracker.squeakland.org/dev

featuring projcts:

each meeting decide which projects to feature each week

one of the ideas from a previous meeting about look of the courseware webpage

http://studentaffairs.uoregon.edu/planning/images/curriculum1.png

"Randy, John, Cherry, Rita

We talked about the nigerian geology project. From Hassans report about his meeting with local teachers in Nigeria we know that children in nigerian schools are probably less prepared for working with etoys than children in wetern countries. We need to have this in mind when preparing projects for them, e.g. what kind of pictures would be appropriate? John said we should more focus on creativity in this project.

Randy said that we probably can not use the same Etoys Unit for all children, one idea is to extend the basic unit for places where it is needed. For the basic unit, we will go through Alan's "steering a car" project and Abe-san's Etoys challenge, to include the main ideas in our unit and to provide tasks for the kids. Randy also mentioned "quadrivium" in an email he did send some days ago. He mainly says

"Arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Arithmetic explains relations between numbers. Geometry explains numbers in space. Music explains numbers in time. Astronomy explains numbers in space and time.

Visual art should be added, maybe as part of geometry - explaining numbers in space."

We will try to include these ideas into the courseware, make it visible on the website and mention it in the lessons, using references.

The next steps for the courseware are testing Randy's lessons in Brazil and Uruguay with Bruno and Fabiana, hopefully get feedback from there. Then we will do the videos and everything else we want to have for every unit to finish Randy's unit and put it on the website.

Cherry asked how we can add/reference to additional knowledge, which is important for a lesson. Rita said, that for the courseware we will try to focus on content which is part of the curriculum anyway, so there should be not much additional knowledge needed, because teacher have to teach the topic anyway and will probably already have their knowledge sources. But it is an important problem to consider, because we will not restrict our units and it could be useful to add links or files with information. So we have to think if e.g. wikipedia would be the way to go? At least there is a wikipedia activity on the xo. Ideas are welcomne here!

We also talked about how and where we will make our courseware available. Rita can contact OLPC via support-gang to make known once we have the first lessons online. Sugar-labs  has a moodle system, Rita will find out how it is used and if it would be an opportunity to put our courseware on it. Cherry requested that we have an offline-version of the courseware also, especially for regions without internet access.

Cherry also talked about eBooks and that with Etoys we could do interactive books. These books could be done by kids for other kids, or include several projects from a kid like a portfolio.

We shortly talked about the age range and decided to drop the "18 and older category" to not give the impression this could be adult content. We also want to stick with "minimal age and older" and not use "and younger", therefore Rand's suggestion for "age 4 and older". A comment has been added to the tracker. http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-533

Christine already started to write the etoys reference manual at FLOSS manuals. Cherry suggested to organize a book sprint to write the documentation. We like this idea and will propose the week after Thanksgiving for the sprint. The invitation will be out next week.